by Noah Gordon
For her parents, each visit to Peoria was an opportunity to renew their Jewishness. They were sought after socially, because Lillian’s cousin, Judah Benjamin, had been elected United States senator from Louisiana—the first Jewish member of the Senate—and everyone wanted to discuss him with the Geigers. They went to synagogue at every opportunity. Lillian exchanged recipes, caught up on gossip. Jay talked politics with the men, drank a convivial schnapps or two, exchanged cigars. He spoke to them of Holden’s Crossing in glowing terms and admitted he was trying to attract other Jews there, so eventually there would be a minyan of ten men, allowing him access to group worship. The other men treated him with warm understanding. Of them all, only Jay and Ralph Seixas, who was born in Newport, Rhode Island, were native Americans. The others had come from abroad and knew what it was to be pioneers. It was hard, they agreed, for a man to be the first Jew to settle anywhere.
The Goldwassers had two plump daughters, Rose, who was a year older than Rachel, and Clara, who was three years older. When Rachel was a little girl she had enjoyed playing games (House, School, and Grown-up) with the Goldwasser girls, but the year Rachel turned twelve, Clara married Harold Green, a hatmaker. The couple lived with Clara’s parents, and that year when the Geigers came for the High Holidays, Rachel found changes. Clara no longer would play Grown-up, because she had become a real grownup, a Married Woman. She talked softly and condescendingly to her sister and Rachel, she waited upon her husband with sweet constancy, and she was allowed to say the blessings over the Sabbath candles, an honor reserved for the matron of the home. But one night when the three girls were alone in the big house, they drank grape wine in Rose’s room and fifteen-year-old Clara Goldwasser Green forgot she was a matron. She told Rachel and her sister all about what it was like to be married. She divulged for them the most sacred secrets of the adult sorority, dwelling with delicious detail on the physiology and habits of the Jewish male.
Both Rose and Rachel had seen the penis, but always in miniature, attached to infant brothers or young cousins, babies in the bath—a soft pink appendage ending in a circumcised knob of smooth flesh dotted with a single hole so the pee could come out.
But Clara, draining the wine with her eyes closed, wickedly outlined the differences between Jewish babies and Jewish men. And, finding the last drops on the outside of the cup with her tongue, she described the transformation of sweet and inoffensive flesh when a Jewish man lay down next to his wife, and what subsequently occurred.
Nobody screamed in terror, but Rose had taken her pillow and was pressing it into her face with both hands. “This happens often?” her muffled voice asked.
Very often, Clara affirmed, and without fail on the Sabbath and religious holidays, God having informed the Jewish male that it was a blessing. “Except, of course, during the bleeding.”
Rachel knew about the bleeding. It was the only secret her mother had told her; it hadn’t happened to her yet, a fact she didn’t share with the sisters. But she was troubled by something else, a matter of the mechanics of measurement, of common sense, and she had been visualizing a disturbing diagram in her mind. Unconsciously she protected her lap with her hand. “Surely,” she said palely, “it is not possible to do that.”
Sometimes, Clara informed them loftily, her Harold employed pure kosher butter.
Rose Goldwasser removed the pillow from her face and stared, her face alight with revelation. “That is why we are always running out of butter?” she cried.
The days that followed were particularly difficult for Rachel. She and Rose, given the choice of regarding Clara’s disclosures as horrifying or comical, in self-defense opted for comedy. During breakfast and lunch, which usually were dairy meals, they had only to meet each other’s gaze to engender explosions of mirth so witless that on several occasions they were sent from the table in disgrace. At dinner, when the two families were joined by their men, it was worse for her, for she couldn’t sit across the table and two chairs down from Harold Green, and look at him, and make conversation, without thinking of him buttered.
On the following year when the Geigers visited Peoria, Rachel was disappointed to learn that neither Clara nor Rose lived in their parents’ home any longer. Clara and Harold had become parents of a baby boy and had moved into a small house of their own on the river bluff; when they came to the Goldwassers’, Clara busied herself with her son and paid little attention to Rachel. Rose had been married the previous July, to a man named Samuel Bielfield, who had taken her to live in St. Louis.
That Yom Kippur, standing outside the synagogue, Rachel and her parents were approached by an elderly man named Benjamin Schoenberg. Mr. Schoenberg wore a stovepipe hat of beaver felt, a ruffled white cotton shirt, and a black string tie. He chatted with Jay about the state of the pharmaceuticals business and then began to question Rachel pleasantly about her schooling and the extent to which she helped run her mother’s household.
Lillian Geiger smiled at the old man and shook her head enigmatically. “It is too soon,” she said, and Mr. Schoenberg smiled back and nodded, and went away after a few more pleasantries.
That evening Rachel overheard snatches of conversation between her mother and Mrs. Goldwasser which revealed that Benjamin Schoenberg was a shadchen, a marriage broker. Indeed, Mr. Schoenberg had arranged the matches of both Clara and Rose. She felt terrible fear, but it was relieved by the memory of what her mother had told the matchmaker. She was too young for marriage, as her parents fully realized, she told herself, disregarding the fact that Rose Goldwasser Bielfield was only eight months older.
All that autumn, including the two weeks she spent in Peoria, Rachel’s body was changing. When her breasts developed, they were womanly from the start, throwing her thin body out of balance, so she had to learn about support garments, and muscle fatigue and back pains. That was the year when Mr. Byers touched her and made her life ugly before her father set things right. When Rachel examined herself in her mother’s looking glass she was reassured that no man would want a girl with straight black hair, narrow shoulders, a neck that was too long, breasts that were too heavy, skin unfashionably sallow, and undistinguished brown cow’s eyes.
Then it occurred to her that any man who would accept such a girl would be ugly himself, and stupid, and very poor, and she knew that every day brought her closer to a future she didn’t wish to contemplate. She resented her brothers and treated them spitefully because they didn’t know what gifts and privileges they had been given with their masculinity, the right to live in the warm safety of their parents’ home as long as they wanted, the right to go to school and learn without limits.
Her menstruation came late. Her mother had asked her casual questions from time to time, revealing her concern that it hadn’t happened yet; and then one afternoon while Rachel was in the kitchen helping to make wild-strawberry jam, with no warning cramps made her double over. Her mother told her to look, and the blood was there. Her heart had pounded, but it wasn’t unexpected, nor had it happened while she was off alone somewhere. Her mother was with her and spoke soothingly, and showed her what to do. Everything was all right until her mother kissed her cheek and told her that now she was a woman.
Rachel began to cry. She couldn’t stop. She wept for hours and was inconsolable. Jay Geiger came into his daughter’s room and lay down on her bed with her as he hadn’t done since she was little.
He stroked her head and asked what was the matter. Her shoulders shook in a way that broke his heart, and he had to ask her again and again.
Finally she whispered, “Poppa. I don’t want to be married. I don’t want to leave you, or my home.”
Jay kissed her cheek and went to talk with his wife. Lillian was very troubled. Many girls were married at thirteen, and she thought it would be better for her daughter if they arranged her life through a good Jewish union than if they indulged her foolish terror. But her husband pointed out that when he had been matched with Lillian she had been past her sixteenth birt
hday, not a young girl. What was good for the mother would be good for the daughter, who needed a chance to grow up and become accustomed to the thought of marriage.
So Rachel had a long reprieve. At once, her life was better. Miss Burnham reported to her father that she was a natural student and would benefit greatly from continuing her education. Her parents decided that she should stay in the academy instead of working full-time in the house and on the farm, as might have been expected, and they were gratified by her pleasure, and by the way life returned to her eyes.
She had an instinctive kindness that was part of her nature, but her own unhappiness had made her particularly sensitive to those trapped by circumstances. She had always been as close to the Coles as if they were related by blood. When Shaman was a toddler, once he had been placed in her bed and had lost control of his bladder, and it had been Rachel who had comforted him and eased his embarrassment, and protected him from the teasing of the other children. The illness that had stolen his hearing had unsettled her, because it was the first incident in her life that indicated to her the presence of unknown and unsuspected dangers. She had watched Shaman’s struggles with the frustration of someone who wanted to make things better but was powerless to do so, and she witnessed each improvement that he achieved with as much pride and gladness as if he were her brother. During the period of her own development she’d seen Shaman change from a little boy to a large youth, easily outstripping his brother, Alex, in size. Because his body matured early, in the first years of growth he was often clumsy and bumbling, like a puppy with new growth, and she regarded him with a special tenderness.
She had sat undetected in the wing chair several times and marveled at Shaman’s courage and tenaciousness, listening in fascination to Dorothy Burnham’s skill as a teacher. When Miss Burnham had wondered who could help him, Rachel had reacted instinctively, eager for the chance. Dr. Cole and his wife had been grateful for her willingness to work with Shaman, and her own family had been pleased by what they considered a generous gesture. But she understood that, at least in part, she wanted to help him because he was her steadfast friend, because once, in perfect seriousness, a little boy had offered to kill a man who was doing her harm.
The basis of Shaman’s remedial work was long hours piled upon long hours, in which weariness had to be disregarded, and he was quick to test Rachel’s authority in ways he wouldn’t have tried with Miss Burnham. “No more today. I’m too tired now,” he said the second time they met alone, after Miss Burnham had accompanied Rachel through Shaman’s drills half a dozen times.
“No, Shaman,” Rachel had said firmly. “We’re not nearly finished.” But he had escaped.
The second time it happened, she’d given in to anger that had merely made him smile, and reverted to their playmate days, calling him names. But when it happened again the next day, tears sprang into her eyes and he was undone.
“Let’s try it again, then,” he’d told her reluctantly.
Rachel was grateful, but she never yielded to the temptation of controlling him in that way, sensing he would benefit more from a steelier approach. After a while, the long hours became routine for them both. As the months passed and Shaman’s capabilities were expanded, she adapted Miss Burnham’s drills and they went beyond them.
They spent a long time practicing how meaning could be changed by accenting different words in an otherwise unchanged sentence:
Sometimes Rachel held his hand and squeezed it to show him where emphasis belonged, and he enjoyed that. He’d come to dislike the piano exercise in which he identified the note by the vibrations he felt in his hand, because his mother had seized upon it as a parlor trick and sometimes called upon him to perform. But Rachel continued to work with him at the piano, and she was fascinated when she played the scale in a different key and he was able to detect even that subtle change.
Slowly he graduated from feeling the notes of the piano to discerning the other vibrations in the world around him. Soon he could detect somebody knocking at the door, although he didn’t hear the knocking. He was able to feel the footsteps of someone mounting a stairway, although they were unnoticed by hearing people nearby.
One day, as Dorothy Burnham had done, Rachel took his large hand and placed it at her throat. At first she spoke to him loudly. Then she moderated the sonority of her voice and dropped it into a whisper. “Do you feel the difference?”
Her flesh was warm and very smooth, delicate yet strong. Shaman could feel muscles and cords. He thought of a swan, and then of a tinier bird as the beat of her pulse fluttered against his hand in a way that hadn’t happened when he’d held Miss Burnham’s thicker, shorter neck.
He smiled at her. “I do,” he said.
37
WATER MARKS
Nobody else shot at Rob J. If the incident at the barn had been a message that he should stop pressuring for an investigation of Makwa’s death, whoever had pulled the trigger had reason to believe the warning was heeded. He did nothing else because he knew of nothing else he could do. Eventually polite letters came from Congressman Nick Holden and from the governor of Illinois. They were the only officials to answer him, and their replies were bland dismissals. He brooded, but he addressed himself to more immediate problems.
In the beginning, he was called upon only infrequently to offer the hospitality of his dugout room, but after he’d been helping slaves to run away for several years the trickle grew to a freshet, and there were times when new occupants came to the secret room often and regularly.
There was general and controversial interest in Negroes. Dred Scott had won his plea for freedom in a Missouri lower court, but the State Supreme Court declared him still a slave, and his abolitionist attorneys appealed the case to the Supreme Court of the United States. Meanwhile, writers and preachers thundered, and journalists and politicians fulminated on both sides of the slavery issue. The first thing Fritz Graham did after he was elected to a regular five-year term as sheriff was buy a pack of “nigger hounds,” because bounties had become a lucrative sideline. Rewards for the return of runaways had increased in size, and penalties for helping fugitive slaves had grown more severe. Rob J. continued to be frightened when he thought of what could happen to him if he were caught, but mostly he didn’t allow himself to think of it.
George Cliburne greeted him with sleepy politeness whenever they encountered one another by chance, as though they weren’t meeting under different circumstances in the dark of night. A by-product of the association was Rob J.’s access to Cliburne’s extensive library, and he availed himself of volumes that he regularly carried home for Shaman, and sometimes read himself. The grain broker’s book collection was heavy in philosophy and religion but light in science, which was how Rob J. found its owner.
When he’d been a Negro-smuggler for about a year, Cliburne invited him to attend a Quaker meeting and was diffident and accepting when he refused. “I thought thee might find it helpful. Since thee does the work of the Lord.”
It was on Rob’s lips to correct him, to say he did the work of man and not of God; but the thought was pompous enough without putting it to voice, and he merely smiled and shook his head.
He realized his hiding was only one link in what doubtless was a large chain, but he had no knowledge of the rest of the system. He and Dr. Barr never referred to the fact that the other physician’s recommendation had led him to become a lawbreaker. His only clandestine contacts were with Cliburne and with Carroll Wilkenson, who told him whenever the Quaker had “an interesting new book.” Rob J. was certain that when the runaways left him they were taken north, through Wisconsin and into Canada. Probably by boat across Lake Superior. That’s the way he would route the escapes if he were doing the planning.
Once in a while Cliburne would bring a female, but most of the fugitives were men. They came in infinite variety, dressed in ragged tow cloth. Some had skins of such negritude it seemed to him the very definition of blackness, the shiny purple of ripe plums, th
e jet of burnt bone, the dense darkness of ravens’ wings. The complexions of others showed a dilution with the paleness of their oppressors, resulting in shades that ranged from café au lait to the color of toasted bread. Most of them were large men with hard, muscular bodies, but one was a slender young man, almost white, who wore metalrimmed spectacles. He said he was the son of a house nigger and a plantation owner in a place called Shreve’s Landing, in Louisiana. He could read and was grateful when Rob J. gave him candles and matches and back copies of Rock Island newspapers.
Rob J. felt thwarted as a physician because he kept the fugitives too short a time to treat their physical problems. He could tell that the lenses of the light-skinned Negro’s spectacles were far too powerful for him. Weeks after the youth had left him, Rob J. found a pair of eyeglasses he thought might be better. Next time he was in Rock Island he went to see Cliburne and asked if he could somehow arrange to forward the glasses, but Cliburne only stared at the spectacles and shook his head. “Thee must have better sense, Dr. Cole,” he said, and walked away without saying good day.
On another occasion a large man with very black skin stayed in the secret room for three days, more than long enough for Rob to observe that he was nervous and suffered from abdominal discomfort. Sometimes his face was gray and sick-looking, and his appetite was irregular. Rob was certain he had a tapeworm. He gave him a bottle of specific but told him not to take it until he arrived wherever he was going. “Otherwise you’ll be too weak to travel, and you’ll leave a trail of loose stool that every sheriff in the country can follow!”
He would remember each of them as long as he lived. He felt an immediate sympathy for their fears and their feelings, and it was more than the fact that once he’d been a fugitive himself; he realized that an important ingredient of his concern was his familiarity with their plight, because he had witnessed the afflictions of the Sauks.
